Whenever I have conversations with people about economics, they frequently like to point to Canada as an example of big government socialism that works. “I just want free single-payer health care and diversity” they cry. “Canada is doing fine, they’re wealthy”. Well, let’s take a look at a report from the federal police in Canada, and find out what they think is really going on.

This is from National Post, one of Canada’s national newspapers:

A secret RCMP report is warning the federal government that Canada may descend into civil unrest once citizens realize the hopelessness of their economic situation.

“The coming period of recession will … accelerate the decline in living standards that the younger generations have already witnessed compared to earlier generations,” reads the report, entitled Whole-of-Government Five-Year Trends for Canada.

“For example, many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live,” it adds.

The report, labelled secret, is intended as a piece of “special operational information” to be distributed only within the RCMP and among “decision-makers” in the federal government.

[…]Right from the get-go, the report authors warn that whatever Canada’s current situation, it “will probably deteriorate further in the next five years.”

[…]In terms of declining living standards and inaccessible home ownership, the RCMP’s warnings are indeed in line with available statistics.

Canadian productivity — measured in terms of GDP per capita — has been trending downwards since at least the 1980s. But this has accelerated dramatically in recent years — even as per-worker productivity rises in many of our peer countries.

If you remember Canadian politics, Canada was doing well under conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, an economist. But then, they decided to elect a part-time drama teacher and snowboarding instructor, with a famous last name, and nice hair. That happened in 2015, and it’s been downhill for Canada’s economy ever since.

More:

An analysis last year by University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe found that if Canada had merely kept pace with U.S. productivity growth for the last five years, Canadian per-capita earnings would be $5,500 higher than they are now.

Meanwhile, housing affordability has reached “worst-ever” levels in most of Canada’s major markets, according to a December analysis by RBC. On average, even condos are now so unaffordable that only 44.5 per cent of Canadian households had sufficient income to buy one at current prices. As for single-family homes, only the richest 25 per cent of Canadian households had any hope of obtaining one.

“Economic forecasts for the next five years and beyond are bleak,” reads the RCMP’s assessment of the rest of the decade, even adding a quote from French President Emmanuel Macron that “the end of abundance” is nigh.

By the way, Canada was also in the news this week for their new hate speech / hate crime legislation. Any dissent from the secular leftism of the ruling communist party will be met with massive fines and up to life in prison.

The origin of life is easy to explain if it is the result of intelligent design, because intelligent agents know how to engineer the building blocks, and how to assemble them into the components of a living system: proteins and nucleic acids. But how can you do it when there are no intelligences allows in your worldview? There is a new article in Nature about that.

The authors write:

To understand how life might have begun, researchers must stop cherry-picking the most beautiful bits of data or the most apparently convincing isolated steps, and explore the implications of these deep differences in context. Depending on the starting point, each hypothesis has different testable predictions. For example, if life started in a warm pond on land, the succession of steps leading from prebiotic chemistry to cells with genes is surprisingly different from those that must be posited if the first cells emerged in deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

Building coherent frameworks — in which all the steps in the continuum fit together — is essential to making real progress. To see why, here we highlight two of the most prominent frameworks, which propose radically distinct environments for the origin of life.

Let’s see what the authors say about the prebiotic soup:

This framework posits that nucleotides are concentrated in a small pond. To form RNA, the simplest and most versatile genetic material, nucleotides must polymerize. That is most easily achieved by drying them out (polymerization is a type of dehydration reaction). Proponents imagine a succession of wet–dry cycles, in which the pond dries out to form polymers of RNA, then fills again with water containing more nucleotides and so on, cycle after cycle, making more and more RNA3.

This is the “RNA World” hypothesis, which I’ve blogged about before. The authors don’t like it:

But this concept raises some difficult questions. It places the onus on an ‘RNA world’, in which RNA acts both as a catalyst (in a similar way to enzymes) and as a genetic template that can be copied. The problems are that there is little evidence that RNA can catalyse many of the reactions attributed to it (such as those required for metabolism); and copying ‘naked’ RNA (that is not enclosed in compartments such as cells) favours the RNA strands that replicate the fastest. Far from building complexity, these tend to get smaller and simpler over time. Worse, by regularly drying everything out, wet–dry cycles keep forming random groupings of RNA (in effect, randomized genomes). The best combinations, which happen to encode multiple useful catalysts, are immediately lost again by re-randomization in the next generation, precluding the ‘vertical inheritance’ that is needed for evolution to build novelty.

If selection on RNA in drying ponds could somehow be made to generate greater complexity, what must it achieve? To make cells that grow and reproduce, RNA must encode metabolism: the network of hundreds of reactions that keeps all cells alive. Modern-day metabolic reactions bear no resemblance to the cyanide chemistry that makes nucleotides in this model. Evolution would therefore need to replace each and every step in metabolism, and there is no evidence that such a wholesale replacement is possible.

The authors are saying that they need to build up complexity from simple to more complex, in order to get the bare minimum they need for simple life. Life basically requires four different capabilities: membrane, energy capture, metabolism, and information storage. And they all have to be there and working right from the start. It’s a frightful amount of complexity to get right – unless you appeal to intelligence.

The authors also talk about life forming from non-living materials in hydrothermal vents:

Our own favoured scenario is that the chemistry of life reflects the conditions under which life began, in deep-sea hydrothermal systems on the early Earth4. In broad brush strokes, this means that gases such as carbon dioxide (the near-universal source of carbon in cells today) and hydrogen feed a network of reactions with a topology resembling metabolism. Genes and proteins arise within this spontaneous protometabolism and promote the flux of materials through the network, leading to cell growth and reproduction. There are plenty of problems here, too, but they differ from those in the prebiotic soup framework.

The first problem is that they need enzymes in order go from simple gases to nucleotides, and they don’t have them:

The first problem is that H2 and CO2 are not particularly reactive — indeed, their chemistry was largely ignored for decades, although rising interest in green chemistry is changing that. But deep-sea vents are labyrinths of interconnected pores, which have a topology resembling cells — acidic outside and alkaline inside. The flow of protons from the outside to the inside of these pores can drive work in much the same way that the inward flow of protons can drive CO2 fixation in cells today5.

[…]But many chemists are troubled by the idea that, in the absence of enzymes to serve as catalysts, hydrothermal flow could drive scores of reactions through a network that prefigures metabolism, from CO2 right up to nucleotides. The chemist Leslie Orgel once dismissed this scenario as an “appeal to magic”. Certainly, further data are required, supporting or otherwise.

They have problems sequencing nucleotides into functioning components:

Polymerization is another stumbling block. Nucleotides have been polymerized in water on mineral surfaces9, but this raises similar questions to those noted for wet–dry cycles about how selection could act. If the problem is solved by polymerizing nucleotides inside growing protocells, mineral surfaces would not have been available. Polymerization would then have needed to happen in cell-like (aqueous gel) conditions, but without enzymes. If serious attempts to synthesize RNA under those conditions fail, the overall framework would need to be modified.

I’m not convinced that mineral surfaces can help with the nucleotide sequencing problem, but they don’t even have those available in the hydrothermal vents.

I studied computer science in university, so biochemistry is all new to me. I am trying to learn it, but I also have to write code all day for work. But thankfully, there are experts who can sort this out for us.

Here is a podcast from the fellows over at the Discovery Institute, and they talked about this article. Podcasts are a great way to try to understand these complex problems.

A common objection against transgenderism by biological realists is to make a parallel argument from anorexia. Conservatives say “we wouldn’t want to help a skinny anorexic person lose weight because they thought they were too fat, would we?” Transgender activists reply that these two things are completely different. Who is right? Well, now we have a peer reviewed study to help us decide.

The new study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Sexuaologie, which is the journal of the German Society for Sexual Medicine, Sexual Therapy and Sexual Science/DGSMTW.

The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine reported on it:

A new publication* in Sexuologie (the journal of the German Society for Sexual Medicine, Sexual Therapy and Sexual Science/DGSMTW) takes on the issue of the sharp rise in transgender identification in adolescent females, which remains poorly understood. The authors, Korte and Gille, present an intriguing hypothesis for this novel phenomenon, comparing and contrasting gender dysphoria to anorexia nervosa, and finding a number of important similarities. The authors conclude that clinicians working with gender-dysphoric adolescents must familiarize themselves with the complex dynamics of female adolescent development, and that trans-affirmative medical interventions should not be considered until adolescent development is complete.

SEGM got permission to post the full English language translation of the study, but I didn’t. So you have to click through to read it.

But here’s the interesting part of SEGM’s synopsis of the paper:

Drawing on their clinical work with such patients, Korte and Gille observe that trans identification in adolescent girls may reflect the desire to circumvent the challenges of female adolescence rather than a deep identification with maleness. They note that “although there is pronounced rejection of the female body and/or the female gender role,” there is frequently no pronounced desire for the primary or even secondary physical characteristics of the opposite sex.

[…]The authors note several similarities between anorexia and gender dysphoria. Both involve body image disorders where  aggression is “turned against one’s own self, inward, but also outward, against important others.” The authors note:

“…in both anorexic eating disorders and gender identity disorders (gender dysphoria), relatives, especially parents, are exposed to strong feelings of helplessness and powerlessness in addition to the massive feelings of guilt and failure that often arise. In both disorders, this sometimes exacerbates the symptoms” of the … patient within a correspondingly pathological relationship dynamic.”

Korte and Gille conclude by outlining concrete steps that pediatricians, child and adolescent psychiatrists, gynecologists, and other medical providers can take to help girls navigate puberty in a way that averts or mitigates these developmental crises. They caution clinicians that in the vast majority of cases of gender dysphoria arising around adolescence, it is likely temporary and represents a maturation crisis or insecurity of ‘sexual, rather than gender identity.”

The authors criticize the “trans-affirmative” (gender-affirming) model of care for adolescents, which is focused on the provision of physical body modifications, as inconsistent with the principles of adolescent development. They highlight the importance of addressing adolescent gender dysphoria within a developmental framework, recognizing the complexity of adolescent experiences and the need for tailored interventions that address underlying conflicts and promote adaptive coping strategies.

I think this study is very helpful for understanding what’s really going on in the mind of young people when they reject their own gender.

In the most recent episode of Knight and Rose, Rose and I were talking about how to be more bold when discussing controversial issues. Our advice was to be the smartest person in the room. I remember when homosexuality was becoming a big issue, I went out and read a whole bunch of books about it, from people like Jeffrey Satinover and Charles Socarides. It’s similar to how I am handling transgenderism now.

Christians should always be the smartest people in the room when these topics come up. Nobody should be listening to the “compassionate” virtue signalers, who just want to jump to affirmation and approval. And the way you beat those people is by asking them a few simple questions about what they know, to show that they aren’t operating from knowledge at all.

The doctors and the surgeons are often just trying to hook a young person onto constant surgeries, drugs and treatments. They want money, lots of money. All you have to do is to ask them what liability they have if their treatment results in regret and the desire to detransition. Is there a warranty? Of course not. Would they put their promises about “pauses” and “rollbacks” in writing? Of course they won’t.

What about the emotion-based friends and relatives? All you have to do is ask them about technical issues. What are the long-term effects of these drugs? How much does it cost? How painful is it? Are there permanent effects? They are supporting the transition because they want to feel good. They want to be liked. When you ask them knowledge questions, the children can see that the feelings-based adults are only serving themselves.

It’s much better to discuss these issues by pointing out the long-term consequences of decisions. Of course young people have feelings. Of course they want to act on those feelings. But young people also need to hear from people who understand what is further down the road. They don’t know that, and they need to rely on adults who know for help. Not the greedy health care workers. And not the low-self-esteem feelings-based crowd.